


What Was Left Untold

by HyperionScience



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, I dunno how to tag that?, Mentions of Canonical Abuse, One-Shot, Pretty sad, Sorta sad, Spoiler for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, Spoilers for Borderlands 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 09:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7709608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HyperionScience/pseuds/HyperionScience
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief-ish character study of Angel and Tim.</p>
<p>An AU where Angel didn't die, but nobody really hung out long enough to realize it.</p>
<p>Rated Teen for canon-typical, nongraphic corpses and blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Was Left Untold

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, welcome to my first fic! I'm pretty excited about it.  
> I really like to mess around with the Timothy and Angel platonic relationship I imagine exists, because Tim is sweet but he looks just like Jack, and Angel deserves to be alive and happy.

 Angel woke up.

 The first thing she noticed was how cold it was in the room. A deep, chilling cold that ate away at her goosebumped skin. She felt numb, and nauseous, and wondered fleetingly if she was in bed, terribly sick, having just spent the night in a fever dream that had spanned over a decade. She sat up, and regretted it, the room she had lived in for as long as she could remember spinning with sickening velocity. The smell of burning metal and blood filled the room, and as the cold, dark walls stopped spinning around her she saw the Angelic Guards lying in ruins, burnt and dissolved away, the pieces scattered across the floor. She put her hand down and touched flesh, her blood running cold. The events of the fight came back to her, and she nearly fainted. 

 Roland lay peacefully beside her, his gloved hands resting on his chest and almost hiding the blood from the hole Jack had blown in his chest. She looked at him for a long while, as if he too would wake up, comment on the scene, and then take her away from this place. He didn't stir. His body was too stiff, too cold, almost otherworldly somehow. Whatever had happened here made everyone leave in a hurry, so much of a hurry that she had been left in her chamber with Roland (For she still thought of him as Roland, not just some dead shell that used to be Roland), presumed dead. Without anyone to help her out, she would be dead before long. 

 The floor gave a sickening lurch as she hauled herself up onto a crate with frail arms, the yellow painted surface gazing menacingly at her. Her breath came in ragged and raspy, her whole body felt weak without the eridium flowing through every vein. She found herself longing for it, now that she could be strong without being in a cage. The pumps that had fueled her were broken, the glowing purple dripping onto the floor in little drops, forming puddles that may have been mirages to her. She opened the crate with a trembling hand, hoping to find something other than bullets. With a hiss, the lid slid open. Bullets. She swore, out loud, and felt free. The ground shook, for the first time not a product of her dizziness.

 There were footsteps now, that she could hear over the ringing in her ears, and before she could process it she looked up to see her father's face looking down at her. It was him, yet not him, a version of him that reminded her of some place lost to her past, and she wondered if she was truly dead, and he was here to drag her to hell with him. She wondered if he was dead. She wondered how long she had been out. A hand reached out for hers, and she stopped wondering for a minute.

 The first thing he did was apologize to her, for something she wasn't sure of until he stuck the needle into her arm. She clung to him, Jack or not, fighting not to fall over as the red liquid coursed through her, slowly bringing her around from the symptoms of her eridium withdrawal. She took a deep breath, finally feeling like she might live through this. 

 He came into focus, his heterochromatic gaze fixed on her, his eyebrows quirked in concern. She reached up and touched his forehead, and he let her run her fingers along his skin, looking for the heavy metal latches that marked her father's face. He said something, and to her, he sounded a million miles away, his voice a mere whisper compared to the deafening noise that used to fill that room. 

 "Who are you?" She asked, revisiting again the thought that she was dying, and she was seeing only what she wanted to. 

 The man opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again, his words stopped on his tongue as he considered them. She let her hand fall away and waited. 

 "Timothy. My name is Timothy." 

 He said the words as if he was afraid of them, as if his name carried some dark power. He looked small, somehow; A Jack that wasn't larger than life, a Jack that was still human. She wanted to trust him, she really did. 

 Angel's foot hit his shin with a hollow sound, and he cried out in pain, stepping back and reaching down to hold his leg. 

 He took a deep breath, his chest rising under his thin cotton shirt, and looked up at her. "Alright... That's fair." He said, his voice pained and tired without a hint of anger or frustration. 

 She watched him carefully as he stood back up, leaning a little more heavily on his left leg than before, and she felt a strange surge of satisfaction that she had actually had an impact. She thought of the work she had done to help the vault hunters. She hoped that it wasn't in vain. 

 "Are you lying to me, Timothy?" She asked, surprised that she wasn't angrier, chalking it up to her recent brush with death, and recuperation from it. She hated looking at him, but some morbid curiosity couldn't pull her away. She knew he was her only way out, but how could she trust the face of her father? 

 "No." He answered, shaking his head a little as if to shake away a thought. "Listen, I know that I'm..."

 He gestured to his face vaguely, his features soft and somewhat young despite the all too familiar angles of his face. She held out her slender hand to him, watching his eyes roam over the pale blue lines that danced up her arm.

 "Please, take me away from here." 

 

 

 The ground shook violently as they walked through Hero's Pass, the carnage of battles fought by the vault hunters evident around every corner. They both tried to pay as little mind to it all as they could, avoiding meeting the cold stares of the corpses they stepped over. Neither knew what had happened after Roland's death, but they both knew, (instinctively, perhaps) where to go. The vault loomed ahead, a concept so great that Angel could barely imagine it. The ground grumbled and shook, anything that may have opposed them scared away by the planet's display of power. They trudged on, slowly and surely, and she listened as Tim explained how he had acquired his face. She nodded as he spoke, and he looked at her, both knowing without speaking that they were very similar, and that whatever they found in the vault would mean the end of being crushed under Jack's heel.

 The roar of the warrior tore through the air as they reached the end of Hero's Pass, and suddenly, the vault was before them.

 A long silence washed over them both, and Angel looked at him. Her heart pounded in her chest, fear and excitement and exhaustion. She doubted she had ever walked so far in her entire life. Every muscle in her body hurt, the walk may well have been a marathon to her and her deteriorated muscles. Despite this she stood on her own, her face unreadable, stuck somewhere between elation and terror. 

 He looked back at her, his handsome features painted with fear. The ground beneath them had stopped shaking, and somehow, that was worse. 

 "What are we doing?" He asked her, and she could read him like an open book. He was doubting, doubting the vault hunters or himself, or something else entirely. He looked ready to run, to leap at the first opportunity to get off of this hunk of rock. She reminded herself again that this wasn't Jack, that he too was a victim in all of this. She shook her head.

 "We have to." She said simply, turning back towards the entrance to the vault. It was truly massive, casting a dark shadow down the rocky path with the unearthly glow coming from within. She stepped into it, and Tim followed, and together they descended the rocky steps into the heart of the Warrior's lair.

 

 

 The warrior, vanquished, had sunken back into the depths, and the vault hunters had left after picking every chest clean. They found Jack, unmasked and bloody, laying crumpled near the bank where lava met stone. They stared at him for a long time, the heat of the volcanic runoff radiating all around them, their faces aglow. The air hung over the plateau, thick and humid, threatening to suffocate them. Angel looked at Tim and noted how different he looked from the corpse, which was twisted in agony. She was still afraid to notice the similarities.

 Time passed, both silent, looking occasionally at each other as they let the finality of it all wash over them in waves. Angel sat on a nearby rock, watching as the lava began to cover his legs, the stench of burning flesh bringing her back to that room, which seemed an eternity away now. She expected to feel more, or rather, to feel something; but nothing came to her as she watched the lava rise, slowly pulling Jack's remains down into the depths of the volcano. (And perhaps, she thought, even further still.) She looked at Tim, who stood frightened, his eyes wide and staring at the place where Jack had been. 

 "I feel like..." He hesitated, looking up at her, his voice barely above a whisper. "I feel like we should say something. Is that weird?" 

 She thought about it for a moment, her eyebrows furrowing just slightly. What did you say when a man like Jack died? What did you say when he was standing right next to you? Should she be afraid of how quickly she had trusted this man with her father's face? 

 "No. Well, not as weird as anything else." She said, getting to her feet. She stood next to him again, near the lava's edge, her hands clasped in front of her. 

 It was still dark there, in the vault. She found that it was nothing like the ending she had pictured, where she would be liberated and look up into a bright blue sky, the kind she remembered from a childhood lost to time. Instead, the clouds hung heavily, dirty and grey, mingling with the smoke that rose from the lake of molten rock. the stone was hot under her feet, the thin soles of her shoes had never been meant for a place like this. She looked out over the sea of orange, taking a deep breath. The moment lingered as she searched for the right words.

 "I wish you hadn't been so fucked up." She said with a small, sad shake of her head, the profanity slipping easily from her lips. "For the good of all of us."

 Tim nodded silently, solemnly, and time began to pass again. She felt the weight of his hand on her shoulder, friendly and comforting. She leaned against him, not daring to look up. 

 "Jack," He started, his eyes glued forwards, much like Angel's, "I went along with so much shit for you... I went along with so much shit _as_ you..." 

 He stopped, and Angel caught a glimpse of his face, his lip trembling in the harsh glow of the volcano. She let more of her weight fall onto him, and he held her to keep himself from shaking. The stone hissed as he let a few tears roll down his cheeks. 

 "Nobody deserved any of this." 

 Above them, the rakks screeched, circling the open air as if searching for something. The two of them fell silent again for a long while, before wordlessly agreeing that there was nothing more for them there. They left Jack, the vault, and the Warrior behind, walking side by side away from something so much bigger than the both of them. Their footprints left sooty marks on the warm stone, and Angel looked over her shoulder to watch as they disappeared into the glow of the volcano's mouth. In a heartbeat, they were through Hero's Pass, and they waited in the dark of the night, still as scared and confused as they had been all along. 

 "I thought I would feel more..." She admitted, sitting on a set of cold metal steps. From where she sat she could make out a tiny house on a jagged rock, standing sad and alone. Something about it was off-putting to her, though she couldn't quite place it. The whole area was too quiet, as if death had pulled it into a cold and lethal embrace. Her words reverberated through the cliffs and the valleys of the slagged ground, another testament to just how permanent her father's presence on this planet was. Tim looked at her, silent and sweet, his empathetic eyes boring into her. 

 "It's ok not to... It's so much, you know?" He said it soothingly, in such a way that if she closed her eyes, she might be able to confuse him for somebody else. He sat down next to her, slowly, knowingly. She nodded, sliding over to rest her cheek on his broad shoulder. The sun began to rise, slowly crawling up into the sky, painting it in shades of orange and pink. The light swirled through the clouds, making them bright and new, and they parted just so to let the clear sky peer through. They sat and watched, shivering in the cold of the morning, the only two living beings left for miles. _This,_ she thought, _was what we've been waiting for._

**Author's Note:**

> The idea behind this fic has been festering for a long time, ever since the release of the doppelganger DLC, really. I've always really wanted to play around with what would happen if they somehow met, even though Angel is dead and Tim is missing. Decided that bonding over the death of Jack would suit them, because I think they're a lot alike, in some ways.  
> Comments are more than welcome, please let me know what you think! I might write more stuff, unless you all beg me not to.


End file.
